The Honeyman Festival: A Novel

The A List

Launched to mark our forty-fifth anniversary, the A List is a series of handsome new editions of classic Anansi titles. Encompassing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, this collection includes some of the finest books we’ve published. We feel that these are great reads, and the series is an excellent introduction to the world of Canadian literature. The redesigned A List books will feature new cover art by noted Canadian illustrators, and each edition begins with a new introduction by a notable writer. We can think of no better way to celebrate forty-­five years of great publishing than by bringing these books back into the spotlight. We hope you’ll agree.

The Honeyman Festival

A Novel

Marian Engel

Copyright © 1970 Marian Engel

Introduction copyright © 2014 Caroline Adderson

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First published in 1970 by House of Anansi Press Ltd.

This edition published in 2014 by

House of Anansi Press Inc.

110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

Tel. 416-363-4343

Fax 416-363-1017

www.houseofanansi.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Engel, Marian, 1933-1985, author

The honeyman festival : a novel / Marian Engel.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77089-831-8 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77089-851-6 (html)

I. Title

PS8559.N5H66 2014         C813’.54         C2014-902690-0

C2014-902691-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014907277

Series design: Brian Morgan

Cover illustration: Michael Cho

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada

Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada

through the Canada Book Fund.

Introduction by Caroline Adderson

In 2006, when I told my husband I had won the Marian Engel Award, his first question was, Who’s Marian Engel?

A Canadian writer, I told him, most famous for her novel about a woman who had a relationship with a bear.

He perked up. "A relationship?"

Yes, I said.

Do you have a copy of this book?

I didn’t. In fact, due to some inexcusable gap in my education, I’d never read Bear. So I went out and bought it, read it, and — ooh la la! — I hid it. And the very next day I got myself more Engel.

One of the bonuses of receiving the Marian Engel Award, therefore, was that it introduced me, belatedly, to the work of this witty, daring, and inventive writer.

In Margaret Atwood’s essay Margaret Atwood Remembers Marian Engel in Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982–2004, she describes visiting Engel after Room of One’s Own published a special Engel issue with her picture on the cover. On the back was the rest of the picture: books piled up and spilling over, a table heaped with objects. ‘The usual chaos,’ [Engel] said. She liked having it in the picture, because it was true, not airbrushed, not artist-as-icon. None of her heroines are bodiless wisps, and several are downright sloppy, a condition she was, as a writer, excellent at describing.

Minn Burge is certainly no bodiless wisp. We first encounter her in The Honeyman Festival in the bath, grotesquely pregnant with her fourth child. If it wasn’t for her crackling mind and wandering memory, you might think she was all body. The house she lives in, 26 Bute Place, is drafty and bug-laden, the registers belched soot, the yard was a mud hole of buried glass, the kitchen freezing . . . In other words downright sloppy is the setting for the novel, which takes place in a single long night while Minn’s husband, a journalist, is away in Katmandu. A lot happens and nothing much. Minn’s hippy attic tenants parade through, evading the rent. A clueless social worker visits. Her children sleep. Then the guests swarm in for the after-party of the Honeyman Festival put on by a local repertory cinema, a celebration of the oeuvre of an American ex-pat director buried somewhere in the hills behind Cannes who had been Minn’s lover when she lived in France in her twenties. Minn even acted in a few of the films shown that night, but is later snubbed by guests who fail to recognize her in her present bulging state. An alcoholic friend drops by to borrow money and, later still, the police. Minn would just like to get some sleep.

Engel isn’t much interested in plot. She’s onto something else entirely. Alice Munro, quoted in Atwood’s essay, describes the private kitchen table conversations of married women in the 1950s, when she was young. [T]here would be exchanges, revelations, a kind of desperate honesty, a subversive wit. Marian Engel’s writing, Munro says, "particularly The Honeyman Festival . . . was a vindication of all that talk. . . . It was the way she wrote. That sort of material wasn’t commonly used; domestic material was either sentimentalized and sugared over, or it was turned back on itself, filled with irony and self-deprecation. She used it as straight literary material, and she made me see that it was possible to use it."

Here is Minn in the tub. She lay back, twisted her neck, considered herself. She was ugly, ugly and hairy with it; rippled with fat. Blue fingers of stretch marks held up her belly. Later they would fade to pale striations, silver tracks of glaciers or snails. Nothing sugared over there. All the long night Minn struggles with her body, and Engel tells it like it is. There’s a lot of peeing, for example, which doesn’t happen much in novels, though does quite a lot in the later stages of pregnancy.

The earth mother sits cycladic on the toilet, the great gush of bladder weighted by foetus follows. She tinkles. The inundation of the world from the fearful mother-cunt, the rain of fertility, the brooding of the goddess: that is called tinkle.

Did I mention Engel is hilarious, as is the mind of Minn as she broods: over her strict, small-town upbringing and her affair with Honeyman; and her chaotic present — marriage, love, child-rearing?

How does Engel pull off this intimate all-nighter? It’s pretty obvious she was working autobiographically. You can’t achieve her acuity of detail without taking a hard look at real life. Minn and Engel also share some biographical facts. Atwood mentions Engel’s years in France. Munro talks about her cleanliness-oriented, small-town, Ontario, Protestant upbringing, so similar to Minn’s.

Engel used to reveal too much to interviewers, Munro says. She felt a need to be forthright with them, to show herself to them as fully human, dirty dishes, empty bottles, and all, which is pretty much a perfect description of The Honeyman Festival. Knowing how close to life Engel was writing only makes the novel more poignant. When Minn wonders about her five-year-old daughter, who will graduate in 1984, for example, she concludes, Not safe to wonder what kind of world it will be then.

In 1984, Engel would be dying of cancer.

After winning the Marian Engel Award, I received congratulatory letters from several people who had known Engel personally. One told me her favourite Engel story, which Atwood also recounts in her essay. Engel was having lunch with the CBC producer Robert Weaver when she suddenly gasped.

Oh my God.

Weaver, aware she was ill, feared the worst, but it turned out she’d just realized she was wearing her dress inside out.

Atwood writes: "‘You have three choices,’ said Bob. ‘You can change it here, you can go to the washroom, or we can brazen it out.’

‘We’ll brazen it out,’ said Marian."

That was how Marian Engel wrote, too. Brazenly. Like a woman who wasn’t afraid to reveal too much. A woman who showed us the dirty dishes and empty bottles and what it was like inside that dress.

For Hana

who wrote to me from

Katmandu

The Honeyman Festival

1

Minn was in the bath, and filled the bath. The globe of her belly rose above the waterline to meet the spotted ceiling. She thought, it’s going to be soon, or a very big kid. It won’t hold on another six weeks. I won’t stretch any farther, it’s as far out as it was when the twins were in there.

Yesterday, when she got on the streetcar, she had had to heave herself up the step using her hands under her belly as a kind of sling. Towards the end, she thought, it’s more a thing than a part of yourself. It ripples with a motion you did not cause. It is an appurtenance of the child, not quite your own body now.

Yet it was her own flesh, the whey-colour of the moon, livid Cranach-flesh, very delicate to look upon, the skin so stretched it divided itself into cells so that at last she believed in cells; thin enough, perhaps, to see through, if she had the will, the energy, to peer down, down, down to the child.

She ran more water, very hot water. To take the stickiness of the long day away.

At first Mordie had thought it was another pair of twins, and sent her for an x-ray, and found there was no danger of that. So it was going to be a very big baby, a boy she hoped for the sake of symmetry. Or perhaps they were a month out on the date. Because no matter what Mordie said it was not going to hang on until the 8th of June.

As the water rose around her, the child kicked and plunged. She tapped it gently with an extended finger, to let it know how things would be if she had the strength. From conception, there was a relationship of sorts. She covered her belly with a wrung-out washcloth to keep it warm.

Around her, the house was silent. It was only seven, but all three of them slept as if they had invented sleep, tongues and arms askew, bums in the air, blankets over their heads. Bennie twisted and floundered like a whale every night, heaving and knotting his fingers together over his head, reaching out for comforts in the dark. They had been out in the mud at the back all day. She would have to remember to worm them soon. And to put a load of washing in when she got out of the bathtub.

Half an hour ago, the so-called Flower Children she let the attic to had laid zithers, guitars and sitars aside and thundered out for pizza. Norman, as usual, was away. If that meant loneliness, it meant also that what was left of wakefulness was hers alone. She could hear time ticking around her, beginning to expand.

Just over four years ago, fertility had taken them by storm. Louisa made them happy, even being pregnant with Louisa made them happy; especially that, for they had wanted to make love all the time, and felt free to. So after Louisa was ambulant, they launched into what turned out to be Bennie and Til.

And, since condoms puncture, dutch caps fly greased into the furthest dusty corner of the bathroom on their coiled spring rims, pills reduce the libido and increase the protruding veins, this one was to be born wearing a Lippes Loop for a lorgnette in June. She was nearer forty than thirty.

He belted her again. Perhaps he was feeling the chill. She turned the hot on again with her soggy feet, and let it run until she was sweating and flushed. She washed her face and her arms languidly. She was very tired. You weren’t supposed to take fat, hot baths in mausoleum tubs towards the end of a pregnancy, you were apt to fall asleep and drown or fall and break your neck getting out or grab the electric light to save yourself and be found blue, naked and rigid on the mat next day by a window-washer, or get Ajax up the birth canal. In some ways, life was comically reduced: sin a chocolate bar at a bus stop, adventure a forbidden bath.

She lay back, twisted her neck, considered herself. She was ugly, ugly and hairy with it; rippled with fat. Blue fingers of stretch-marks held up her belly. Later, they would fade to pale striations, silver tracks of glaciers or snails. And there would be there, again, the negroid pigmented line from navel to mons. Something primaeval and sinister about that, hidden where you could not crane to see it, your body pulling a fast one.

She wasn’t, any more, in good shape. Her doctor, Mordie, wasn’t glad to see her. He liked fertility, he had the joy in him when he probed a belly or yanked a baby out of one, but he was disgusted by women who were soft, out of shape. Yesterday he had not smiled when he listened to the heart, or joked over the fore-finger examination, or, knowing that Norman was away, flattered her sagging vanity. He said, Why don’t you do some work around the house for exercise?

It’s soon, isn’t it?

June the eighth, baby, June the eighth. Uncle Mordie’s never wrong. You’re eating too much, watch it.

There was beer in the afternoon after wiping the nap-shit off the walls, and peanut butter sandwiches when they got her up at night, and eating their leftovers, and guzzling and stuffing when you were too angry to consider hitting them. And you couldn’t walk it off, you didn’t have three hands,